"We were never a normal rock group. Can was an anarchist
community." Irmin Schmidt

There is a significant lobby among rock fans - and probably
an even stronger one among musicians - that Can were
the greatest band ever. They were, beyond any shadow of doubt,
the brightest star in the Krautrock galaxy, or as Julian Cope
put it in Krautrocksampler, his book on the genre: 'every
one of Can's members is a hero, a Wizard and a True-star.' Amazingly,
a quarter of a century on, they still sound ludicrously contemporary,
both on their original discs and on an ever-burgeoning array
of sampled treatments by others. Can started out with pretty
serious music credentials. Holger Czukay (bass) and Irmin
Schmidt (keyboards) had both studied under the avant-garde
classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the onset of 1967
found the duo, both in their thirties, involved in teaching
(and in Schmidt's case conducting) modern classical music. It
was then that Michael Karoli (guitar), one of Czukay's
pupils, played him "I Am The Walrus", closely followed
by choice albums by Hendrix, Zappa and the Velvet Underground.
Enlisting Jaki Liebezeit - a free jazz drummer, also
in his thirties - a group was formed, initially called Inner
Space. True to the spirit of the May 1968 riots, the group's
early live appearances were noisy and confrontational, and their
relative lack of conventional technique on their chosen instruments
allowed them to avoid the technical clichs of the era's progressive
rock groups. Can were not interested in impressing audiences
with virtuoso skills and never suggested in their playing that
they were great artists slumming it in rock music. And, although
they gradually achieved more form, they would always create
their pieces out of collective improvisation, becoming, in Karoli's
description, 'a geometry of people'. By the time they were
ready to record their first album they had teamed up with a
an incredibly volatile black American artist called Malcolm
Mooney, who had no musical background save the ability to
scream and moan effectively. The first results of this collaboration
were released as Monster Movie (1969), an album
clearly influenced by The Velvet Underground but somehow rawer
and more primal. All the early Can trademarks were in place:
the unchanging two note bass-lines, the metronomic, almost machine-like
drumming, the distortions of guitar and keyboards. On top of
this, Mooney's ravaged howl relayed disturbing babble or, on
the slow-burning, almost tribalistic "Yoo Doo Right",
sections from an intimate letter he had received. Mooney's demented
performances were part of Can's live appeal but it soon became
clear that much of this dementia was real. Under a psychiatrist's
advice Mooney returned to America, leaving Can without a vocalist
again. Help was at hand when Czukay discovered one Damo Suzuki,
a young Japanese traveller, busking outside a caf and asked
him to join. Suzuki's unique vocalizing - an amalgam of
Japanese, German, English and words culled from the very fringes
of language - was introduced on The Can Soundtracks (1970),
an album (in part of film music) which witnessed the group perfecting
its cyclical dancefloor groove. The real turning point, however,
came at the end of the year when Can set up at Inner Space,
a studio in a castle outside Cologne, under the guidance of
one Conny Plank. The immediate result was a quite extraordinary
double album, Tago Mago (1971). The sound here
was less upfront and more controlled than before. The eighteen-minute
locked groove of "Halleluwah" sounded like a shotgun-wedding
of the James Brown band and The Velvets playing "Sister
Ray", while "Aumgn" and "Peking O"
took rock music out to the limits: forbidding yet fascinating,
dense and abstract yet intensely physical. If the next
album, Ege Bamyasi (1972), sounded rather humbled
and subdued after its devastating predecessor, then 1973's Future
Days saw Can breaking away into entirely new territories.
The overall sound is glacial and undulating, achieving a kind
of blissful melancholia under which occasional, barely perceptible
squalls of violence or euphoria make themselves felt. In 1973
Damo Suzuki left Can to become a Jehovah's Witness. His departure
did not seem to affect the band as much as Malcolm Mooney's
and the following year they produced their final masterpiece,
Soon Over Babaluma, with Karoli and Schmidt taking
over the vocal duties. Its jagged but lush pulsations anticipate
much of the club music of the last decade and, in the drifting
vapour trails of "Quantum Physics", some of today's
more eventful ambient music (Aphex Twin, for example).
Can's growing cult following brought them a contract with Virgin
in 1975 which meant more money (one hopes) and better recording
facilities. It also seemed to mark the end of Can as a 'geometry
of people'. They could never truly become a normal rock group
but they seemed to be getting close. Landed (1975)
and Flow Motion (1976) were great collections
of off-kilter pop songs - Flow's "I Want
More" gave the band their only UK chart entry - but they
lacked the sense of wonderment that characterized the 1969-74
releases. For that, though, fans could turn to two wonderful
compilations of early rarities, issued as Limited Edition
(1974) and Unlimited Edition (1976). By 1976,
Holger Czukay had begun to occupy an increasingly marginal position
in the group. He was credited only as 'sound editor' on the
proto-world-music release Saw Delight (1977),
and it was probably his lack of input coupled with the presence
of two rather workmanlike session musicians -Reebop Kwaku
Bah (ex-Traffic, bass) and Rosko Gee (percussion)
- which gave that album a somewhat turgid feel. The group's
final, Czukay-less LP, Can (aka Inner Space;
1978), with its genuinely funny demolition of the "Can-Can",
had an appealingly throwaway quality to it - almost a shrug
of the shoulders at the realization that the group could never
flourish within a major record company's conventional rock format.
Post-Can, Holger Czukay has produced some of the greatest, wittiest
world music fusions, and collaborated with Jah Wobble (with
Jaki Liebezeit), David Sylvian, and U2's The Edge; Irmin Schmidt
returned to film work (Can fans should seek out his Soundtracks
anthology); while both singers have occasionally stepped
out fronting their own bands. However, there was to be
an encouraging group postscript, when in 1986 the core members
of Can staged a one-off reunion in the studio together with
a more sedate Malcolm Mooney. Apparently, Mooney had found,
down the back of a sofa, an air ticket the band had sent him
in the US a decade before, and was prompted to renew contact.
The most you can normally expect from reunions and comebacks
is that if you grin and bear it the whole thing won't be too
painful. However, when the resultant album, Rite Time,
was eventually released in 1989 it proved to be their finest
since 1975.